Thirteen candidates, ten offers
One of Cornerstone Healthcare's four services sits in an area that no public transport routes reach. For months the team advertised its care vacancies there and got nowhere: the home stayed at full occupancy, as care homes do, and agency staff covered the gaps at significant cost, week after week, putting different faces on each shift in a setting where familiarity is part of the care.
So the people team changed the offer. They put 15 sponsorships on the table and re-ran the adverts.
“As soon as you advertise that you're offering sponsorship to international workers, the amount of applications that come through significantly increases.”
Applications arrived at a volume that let Cornerstone choose who to meet. The service could host 15 candidates at a time, so the strongest 15 were invited. Thirteen turned up. By the end of the day, ten of them had job offers, and the remaining five certificates have been used since.
A year of advertising had produced nothing, one open day produced a staffed home.
A day like that is only repeatable because of what happens after the offers, when somebody has to sponsor everyone who said yes. At Cornerstone that somebody is Bethan Jones, People Services Lead, and assigning certificates to 15 new starters took her about an hour on Borderless. To see why that hour matters, rewind a few years.
Three spreadsheets, one pair of hands
When Bethan joined Cornerstone nearly five years ago, the business sponsored two, maybe three people. A ramp-up began in 2023 and never really stopped: by the end of 2025 there were around 80 sponsored healthcare assistants and nurses, spread evenly across the four services.
The machinery holding it together was three trackers Bethan built herself: who needed sponsoring, where each case stood, and the outcomes and renewal dates. They deserved a daily check; in a busy week they got one. A case on the move, a renewal, a change of circumstances, a chased document, could take up to an hour of her week on its own, and the quiet ones still had to be checked, confirmed, and marked “no action needed” in a cell.
“It's people's lives we're talking about, their ability to live in this country. One missed email could mean they don't get their visa. That's a huge responsibility.”
Removing the risk
The solicitors on retainer handled the applications themselves, then stopped. On the records a sponsor has a duty to keep, there was no guidance beyond the Home Office's own, which changes constantly. “We were relying on a spreadsheet, just hoping for the best that we were getting it right,” says Bethan. “There was nobody there saying: actually, now you need their payslips on file.”
The decision to move came at the end of 2025, made by Cornerstone's then director of HR after years of the same conversation with Bethan about the admin load, and about how much of the licence lived in one person's head. This was not a growth project. It was the removal of a risk with 80 names on it.
“Where I worked previously, I was the Level 1 user, doing the applications myself on the SMS. That felt quite daunting; you're always worried about getting it wrong. Borderless takes that weight away. You're more confident the applications are going through okay.”
Five minutes to sponsor
Sponsoring somebody now takes Bethan five minutes: enter the offer and the basic details, and the platform checks the rest, flagging on entry if something makes a candidate ineligible rather than three emails later. When a visa is 120 days from expiry, the renewal starts with a reminder, not with somebody remembering to check a spreadsheet.
The oversight has spread beyond the people team. Cornerstone's recruiters log in to see exactly where each candidate's application stands: waiting on the candidate, with the Home Office, or booked for biometrics. They can answer “where's my visa?” with specifics rather than “we've sent your details to a third party”, and they can forecast start dates instead of guessing at them.
The licence health score, Borderless's measure of how audit-ready the licence is as a whole, shows the size of the change. It stood at 48% when first measured in March 2026: the gaps that three trackers and no guidance had left invisible, surfaced all at once. Five months later it stands at 88%, with 872 worker documents held on the platform. Each worker also carries their own compliance score, a separate per-person measure of how complete their records are, and the average across all 92 is 94.5%.
“If anybody asks me where their application's at, or what the delay is, I can just log on and see.”
The confidence reads clearest at the top of the org chart. Paul, Cornerstone's CEO and Marie's line manager, hears about sponsorship in general updates and otherwise leaves it alone. “He just needs to know that we're managing it,” says Marie, “and that our guys are getting sponsored.”
“The other day we used up all of our remaining CoS. I sponsored about 15 people, and it took me an hour.”
Under the old process, 15 new sponsorships meant 15 Word documents and weeks of back and forth.
Recruitment, business as usual
The service that is located in the most picturesque setting, but without local transport routes, now recruits like the other three. As each open-day starter completes onboarding, the weekly agency forecast drops again, and the same faces appear on shift each day. In complex care that consistency counts double: residents do better with people they know.
“What we don't necessarily see day to day is the impact this has on that individual, how it changes their life and helps their family.”
Underneath it sits the number a care business feels most. In five years of sponsorship and 92 sponsored workers, Cornerstone has never had one choose to leave.
Sponsorship hasn't changed which roles Cornerstone hires for. It has changed which vacancies stay open. “It opens more of a pool of talent,” says Marie. “We have really challenging areas to recruit into, and it helps us fill the gaps where we're struggling.”
“It does all the thinking for you. It tells you when you need to do something, and when something's wrong. You just wait until you're told what to do by the system, which is nice and easy.”